If national Democrats’ goal is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House to preserve democracy — and they’ve built the 2024 election on just that premise — who is best equipped to do it? And after a disappointing debate performance by President Joe Biden last week, is it possible that there is a Democrat more likely to beat Trump than the current president?
Polling gives us one way to answer this question. But it’s not as simple as looking at the topline numbers and deciding it’s time to dump Biden. The only timeline we know anything about, concretely, is the one we’re living in: anything else is purely speculative, and requires some suspension of belief, some scrutiny to look at the numbers, and some skepticism about how we can expect the masses to behave. response.
What we know: The data shows a wash
There are a few different ways to judge how a hypothetical non-Biden candidate might fare against Trump:
- Head-to-head polling, which asks voters who they would vote for: Trump or [insert Democrat here]?
Polls taken before Thursday gave essentially the same answer: Any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — did the same or worse than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they would vote in a head-to-head matchup.
In an average of national polls drawn between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden. About 2.3 percentage pointsThat’s according to tracking by former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.
More recently, A New York Times/Siena College Poll Ask this question of potential voters. Harris has the support of about 42 percent of respondents compared to 48 percent who said they would support Trump, trailing by 6 points. Biden, by comparison, received the support of 44 percent of respondents to Trump’s 48, trailing by 4 points. The 2-point gap is within the margin of error, so there’s little daylight between Biden and his vice president.
Less polling data exists for non-Harris alternatives. Back in February, Carlson Also compiled The results of different polls of the same period which voters Trump and Whitmer, Newsom, Buttigieg or Sens. Asked to choose between West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders All of these polls were conducted at different points in those 11 months, by different pollsters, about different hypothetical matchups. He found that only Manchin did better than Biden — but only by one vote.
Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump when he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but also based on only two polls.
- Who is better-liked?
Another way to ask this question is to look at favorability ratings for Biden, Biden alternatives, and Trump. Both Biden and Trump are historically disliked political figures — Biden himself … the most unpopular modern president since Trump. Here’s our latest source of data that compares the options, also from before the debate: the Economist/YouGov poll From the last week of June Asked about approval ratings for Trump, Biden and Harris.
The poll found that 57 percent of Americans disliked Trump and 39 percent liked, putting him at -18 percent. Biden is viewed similarly: 58 percent of the public disapprove and 39 percent like, putting him at -19 percent.
Harris does slightly better: 54 percent disapprove, and 37 percent like, putting him at -17 percent.
In other words, Harris is viewed slightly less negatively than Biden, but he is not significantly more popular.
The polling aggregate of favorability ratings looks similar to something. Real clean politics mean, Harris Holds a -14.8 point rating; Biden stands at -15.3; Trump stands at -11. Biden and Harris are viewed roughly the same way.
Since the debate, we have a really clear source of how Americans view these statistics: a Data for progress flash polls Entered the field the day after the debate. A survey of about 1,000 potential voters was conducted The The main evidence used by Biden defenders and Biden critics to make their case, however, shows much of what we saw before the debate: No alternative candidate could do better than Biden against Trump.
In terms of vote share, Harris performed roughly the same as Biden, garnering the support of 45 percent of likely voters compared to Trump’s 48 percent. Other Democrats, such as Buttigieg, Newsom, Whitmer and Shapiro, won a smaller share of the electorate—ranging from 44 to 43 percent of likely voters. But at the same time, in those matchups, the share of undecided voters increases. Trump’s support, meanwhile, remains consistently between 46 and 47.
“What we’re seeing often is that Trump’s numbers are pretty solid. Trump doesn’t move much,” Natalie Jackson, a pollster and vice president of the GQR public opinion research firm, told me. “He’s pretty much stuck around where he was in 2020.”
And these are all national elections — if you’re wondering who might do better in certain battleground states important to winning the Electoral College vote, we just don’t have the data.
which we do not know
Still, it’s too early to tell what the American public will think about replacing Biden with an alternative.
Plenty of political developments and newsworthy events are still unfolding, affecting how people think about Thursday night.
And even a poll from Thursday that everyone’s been referring to should be taken with a grain of salt, Jackson told me, because it was put together and fielded so quickly, it’s open to some bias, since it’s sampling people who debate almost immediately. Willing to answer questions about.
“We don’t know for two or three weeks how all these numbers are baked in, and now we’ve stacked the immunity case on top of it, so it’s possible that we’ll never really know how this one event played out,” he told me.
Next, we are working on assumptions. Any discussion of how a Biden alternative would fare against Trump is purely hypothetical at this point: We don’t really know how well any of these candidates will do among certain types of voters or in different states or regions. How to Whitmer in the Sun Belt? How will Newsom do in the Midwest? These questions are crucial to winning the Electoral College, and the polls we received didn’t come close to answering them.
Nor do we know how any of these candidates will rise to the top of the ticket and how their path will affect their popularity (or lack thereof). Will the nomination flow to Harris, who despite years of negative coverage seems the logical successor? Will she run for Newsom, Whitmer or Shapiro — and if so, how will the Democratic base, especially black voters, react to the first black female vice president so publicly stepping aside? Will all this be fought under an open convention in Chicago? And will all this chaos make the eventual nominee deal with the same kind of damage that Biden’s age is dealing with him now?
But, broadly speaking, there are two ways of looking at the data we have.
The first is that polls show that hypothetical Biden alternatives will do no better than Biden (usually what Biden defenders say). The second is that they are doing just as well as Biden without running as an actual presidential candidate — and could still do better (what Biden critics say).
But neither side can claim to be completely right, and both sides have strong counterarguments. The DFP voteFor example, it shows that Harris, post-debate, still has a better favorability score than Biden and is doing better than the president with women, Latino voters and young voters — groups that Biden has. Struggle with overall. Philip Bump at The Washington Post Did some digging Also last week, the poll compared the favorability ratings of Harris and Biden among subgroups before the debate and found that Harris appears to be viewed more favorably by young voters, women and non-white voters.
At the same time, respondents likely still don’t see Harris or the alternatives as real alternatives, instead viewing these names as stand-ins for “generic Democrats” — anyone who isn’t Joe Biden. Each of these options is less popular than Biden in DFP’s poll; Unless you’re super plugged into political news or from the Midwest, you probably don’t know who Gretchen Whitmer is; If you know Gavin Newsom, you probably have strong feelings about him.
Whitmer, Shapiro, and Buttigieg, for example, all have better net favorability ratings than Biden or Harris in DFP polls, but many Respondents say They haven’t heard enough about these people to form an opinion. For Shapiro, Whitmer, and Buttigieg, the share of respondents who had not heard of them far outweighed the share who could form a positive or negative opinion. Newsom is the most well-known of these options, but he’s as disliked as Biden and even more so than Harris.
Being little known isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For those optimistic about Alterna-Bidens, this means more room for these candidates to grow, for the public to get to know them, and to deliver a new, positive message.
But there’s also a pessimistic side: You’re less publicly tested and more vulnerable to closet skeletons. Many will attempt a first national campaign on the highest-stakes platform possible.
In short, we don’t know much. All these assumptions we are trying to play from a very limited set of data And as we get further from the debate, we get a bunch more data. As it happens, Jackson urges a word of caution.
“I think we’re in a position where there’s so much going on that we haven’t seen before that we should treat polling with skepticism and what it is: a snapshot of what opinion looks like at the moment that could change.”
